“Spiritualism Reconjured”: A special issue of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers
Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers seeks essays devoted to the study of women's writing by, for, and about members of the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement. Spiritualism was a wildly popular religious practice that burst onto the American scene in 1848 when two young girls in Hydesville, New York, claimed to be communicating with the dead. Within months, the movement spread from the Burned-Over District to the rest of the country, where, prompted by the cacophony of spirit voices suddenly audible to them, Spiritualist practitioners produced an enormous number and variety of publications, including transcriptions of séances and trance lectures; instruction manuals for reaching the dead; novels, short stories, and poems dictated by or devoted to the spirits; and newspapers delivering weekly and monthly news from the spirit realm. Even for those indifferent or opposed to the movement, its cultural ubiquity was impossible to ignore and its disruptive tendencies spawned debates around theology, gender, labor, domesticity, sexuality, and nearly every species of political, legal, and economic reform.
In 1989, the religious historian Ann Braude persuasively (and groundbreakingly) argued that female mediums and trance lecturers contributed significantly to antebellum political debates surrounding women's rights, abolition, and temperance. In her wake, scholars of religion have continued to excavate Spiritualism's cultural importance in the nineteenth century and since, but literary critics and historians have lagged in their attention to Spiritualism's creative aspects and outputs—particularly those by women writers. Literary histories of the Spiritualist movement have often centered texts by male writers who ridiculed its association with women's rights, “free love,” and other feminist reforms. Important studies of the ghost story and the gothic novel have occluded Spiritualist writing or secularized its specifically religious elements. Studies of women's writing have overemphasized single texts (particularly Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar) and obscured the wider field.
This special issue seeks to build a more complete picture of Spiritualism as it informed or infused the lives and work of American women writers, and in particular to move beyond portraits of Spiritualism as an exclusively middle-class and white phenomenon. We invite contributions that address works by, about, or for Spiritualists, in any genre or form: novels, stories, sketches, chronicles, reports, letters, tracts, poetry, and more. We especially welcome essays or features about the Spiritualist activities of Black, indigenous, and other minoritized women (such as Rebecca Cox Jackson, Harriet Wilson, Sojourner Truth, and Elizabeth Keckley) and those that attend to the classed, gendered, and raced dynamics of Spiritualist practice and publication. And since much Spiritualist writing is not credited to a living woman at all but to a spirit speaking through her, and since women edited or co-edited at least 25% of all Spiritualist periodicals in the half-century after Hydesville, we seek essays that interrogate how Spiritualist involvement expanded notions of authorship and agency for women writers and/or how attention to women's Spiritualist writing might transform our own critical practices.
Possible essay topics include, but are by no means limited to:
- Mediumship as imaginative, authorial, rhetorical, and/or linguistic practice
- Spiritualism and/as fiction: mediumship as fiction writing, Spiritualists as subjects for fiction, or Spiritualism's relationship to ideas of fictionality
- Spiritualism, sexuality, and gender identity in the séance room and beyond
- Women writers and editors in the Spiritualist press
- Race and its implications in and for Spiritualist practice and writing
- Spiritualism as site for women's labor and professional achievement
- Spiritualism and disability
- Spiritualism and indigenous (North American and African) religious practices
- Trans- or circum-Atlantic Spiritualist networks
- Spiritualism and/as organized religion, including its relationship to or entanglement with non-Christian religions
- Black and Indigenous women Spiritualists, their networks and communities
- Spiritualism and social, political, cultural, and religious reform
- Fore- and afterlives of Spiritualism, from late-eighteenth-century mesmerism to twentieth-century New Age religion to the contemporary Spiritualist Association of Churches
Deadline: Completed papers must be submitted by August 1, 2024. Length limit: 10,000 words (including endnotes and list of works cited) using MLA format. Send electronic copies of papers to the special issue's guest editor, Ashley Reed (akreed@vt.edu).
In addition to articles, the guest editor also welcomes proposals for Legacy's feature sections: Profiles, Reprints, From the Archives, and On Culture. (For decriptions of these sections, see https://legacywomenwriters.org/submissions/) Proposals for these sections (500 words) should be sent to Ashley Reed (akreed@vt.edu) by December 1, 2023; completed features must be submitted by August 1, 2024.